


Connections

by divingforstones



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Episode Tag: Life Born of Fire (minor flashback), Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Surgery, Touch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-11
Updated: 2014-04-11
Packaged: 2018-01-18 23:31:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1446970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/divingforstones/pseuds/divingforstones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p> “Gave us a bit of a scare, you keeling over like that. You’re a bit too tall to be doing that safely in the office, you know.”</p><p>“Will bear that in mind in future, sir,” promises James.</p><p>James loses his appendix and gains something rather unexpected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Connections

**Author's Note:**

> Lots of thanks to wendymr for being such a constructive beta and especially for the feedback on this.

 

  
“There you are. All over now. Feel better?”

James can remember the last time he woke in a hospital room to Lewis standing over him. This strange feeling of equanimity now may well be the relief of knowing that he hasn’t messed up in spectacular fashion this time. No burning buildings left in his wake. No compromised investigations. No horrible, gut-wrenching, miserable fear of losing Lewis— _just go away, I don’t want to see you_ —in those last few awful hours before it all finally imploded.

This time, Lewis hooks a chair with his foot, keeping his gaze on James, and lowers himself into it right beside the bed. _Staying. He’s staying._ This time _,_ James has only committed the relatively minor sin of not realising what was happening to him before his ignominious collapse.

He has the feeling he should be embarrassed about that collapse. But then he also remembers being caught, and held, and _Bloody hell! James!_ And landing on the floor with an opposing force pulling at him, softening his landing. Being held and guarded and those hands not really letting go, through it all, until, regretfully, he’d been rolled onto a colder, unyielding stretcher. It’d been a shame about the pain, spoiling all the holding, distracting him.

Of course, embarrassment may come later. It could, rather prosaically, be the drugs warding it off now. He doesn’t think so, though. He thinks it was all the holding. It just kept the embarrassment at bay.

Lewis is reaching for a plastic cup with a straw, on the table beside the bed. “Sip,” he instructs, offering it. James, his limbs not entirely willing to alert to his wishes yet, gets a hand to it all the same,  partly covering Lewis’s hand, and sips. Lewis returns the cup to the table with a nod.

“Gave us a bit of a scare, you keeling over like that. You’re a bit too tall to be doing that safely in the office, you know.”

“Will bear that in mind in future, sir,” promises James.

The pain had suddenly become too much to handle, he remembers, that’s what had happened first. He’d been sitting at his desk, and had risen, almost involuntarily, coming around it, and then it had surged up at him again, impossibly sharper still, and made him stop, turn his head toward Lewis. James’s vision had been going dark around the edges by then, but he’d heard the familiar scrape of the wheels of a desk chair going backward, but very quickly, everything must have been fast-forwarding, because Lewis had been beside James quicker than he could possibly have come around his desk.

“Think you missed all the excitement of your ambulance ride,” Lewis informs him in matter-of-fact tones now. “You conked right out the moment after they took you off me—put you on the stretcher.”

James remembers Lewis’s voice bellowing an order about an ambulance—at someone unfortunate in the corridor, perhaps—and then the instant change back to the gruff, gentle tone addressing him, murmuring words he doesn’t remember now, but words which had been just for him, along the lines of assuring him that he’d be all right. And he is. Despite the pain, and his body’s traitorous betrayal, he is all right. James likes to think that he’ll always be all right if the voice instructing him that he will be is inflected with that particular Geordie accent.

“Could have taken a chunk out of our doorframe with your head if I hadn’t been in your way, sergeant.”

And after a bit, Lewis’s folded suit jacket had been tucked under James’s head, on their office floor, smelling like Lewis, something else to focus on amidst that pain that had been threatening to overwhelm all his senses. Although—it’d been good when one of the hands had been under his head at first, too. But it was his forehead and his shoulder’s turn to be held then, as he lay on his side, and tried to resist the urge to curl up with the pain.

“Laura said you must’ve been feeling pretty unwell before?”

Oh, she’d been there after a bit too. Smaller, defter, smoother hands added to the larger, warmer, rougher ones. One of the larger ones had been on his arm at that stage, holding him firmly though the thin cotton of his shirt sleeve.  The other one was cupped around his head, fingers moving just slightly, slowly, in his hair, against his scalp. The smaller hands had untucked his shirt, feeling his stomach carefully for tenderness, not objecting to the disobedient way his body really kept trying to curl itself in, in protest; just feeling gently.

“You’d said earlier it must’ve been prawn sandwiches again,” says Lewis now, aggrieved.

“I did,” James agrees, rather unrepentantly.

“You could try going to a doctor a bit sooner. You know, like when the pain actually starts.”

James rouses a bit at that hypocrisy. “Like you and your toothache.”

Lewis huffs beside him. He reaches for the plastic cup again. James takes an obliging sip. Surely he can indulge himself if he’s been ill enough to need surgery? He can just lie here and exist off sips of water and spar away in desultory fashion. Almost like pillow talk. Well, his head’s on a pillow, anyway. He can lie here and let himself just relax into the knowledge that Lewis is here, watching over him, and just drift off for a while in the brightness and warmth of this room. Price—one appendix. Who needs their appendix? Not James.

It’s all gone rather quiet now, apart from Lewis. Lewis keeps clearing his throat for some reason. It’s a soft, familiar, comforting sort of sound in itself, letting James know that Lewis is still here without the need for him to open his eyes.

“Innocent’s PA—” starts Lewis’s voice eventually.  James hums, sympathetic, amused, knowing what Lewis thinks of the new woman and her over-officious efforts at following up tardy paperwork “—she even rooted out your emergency contact details. Had a go at contacting—”

James comes to, in a hurry, his eyes flying open, taking a sharp breath. _Fuck._ When he lets his gaze move sideways to Lewis, he’s just looking at James now, waiting.

“How many aunts d’you have, lad?” Lewis asks gruffly.

 _Fuck._ And there’s nothing to say. There’s no avoiding it. “One.”

“One living, d’you mean, or—”

“No. I only ever had just the one.”

Lewis doesn’t need to say it. It’s right there in his eyes. He’s thinking back to the driveway of Ivor Denniston’s house, to their first case together.

_“I had an aunt, so I know what it can be like.”_

_“And did she make a good end, as they say?”_

_“No. She lost her faith.”_ His own reply, right in front of Lewis, back to haunt him, all these years later.

Lewis clears his throat yet again. “And you—”

“I put her down as my next of kin. Yes. Even though she’d died before I joined the police.”

James aims for his best neutral tone although he knows, just as well as Lewis does, that the words he’s saying are anything but normal. But it’s the best way to do these things, always has been. Matter-of-fact, that’s the way to go. Whether you’ve just been made head boy and are singled out for a music award at the end of your second-last year in school and there’s no-one there who’s yours in the massed ranks of families, or it’s your university graduation and you’ve done rather well again, but it’s much the same story, and once again you’re being introduced by yourself to your classmates’ parents. Never stops the bloody sympathetic looks, though, however much polite obliviousness you put into your expression in teenage years, or stand-offishness later on.

“All right,” says Lewis nodding, “I’d figured out as much. You just put down her old contact details?  All right.” Another nod. “Her old address and number.” He’s looking at James but not with sympathy. More—appraising. And slightly—is he anxious?

Of course, Lewis, after Crevecoeur, he knows, or maybe thinks he knows, but still doesn’t ask about things. He’s not going to ask whether it’s that there’s no-one at all, or just no-one that James ever wants contacted. The dearth of candidates in James’s life to put in that bloody box on that form; that won’t be a huge surprise to him, even if this particular lie obviously was. If you can call it a lie. It’s not a lie he’s told to Lewis, at least. Lying can be all right sometimes, as long as it’s never lying to Lewis again. _You lied to me. To me!_ It’s not that, this time. Will this instead be seen as a breach of regulations? Supplying false information on an official form? Freakish, morbid, stupid behaviour?

“They won’t let you leave it blank,” James finds himself explaining. _No-one ever lets you leave it blank._

“I know,” says Lewis. Then he frowns a little, a familiar prelude to saying something that he wants James to listen to. James waits, resignedly. Lewis is his governor and it’s his job, his job, to take James to task for this. The least James can do is to take it with the best grace he can muster. It’ll still be better than sympathy.

“Well, you’ll be needing someone to put in that box,” begins Lewis. “Preferably someone who’s alive. ‘Specially considering your propensity for getting yourself shot. Or poisoned.” _Or almost burnt to death,_ hovers between them unsaid. _“_ Or God knows what, next time,” finishes Lewis. “’S’a bloody wonder you’ve managed to get away with it this long,” he mutters to himself.

“Indeed, sir,” says James, aiming for a sardonic drawl and missing by a country mile. So much for taking this with good grace. But it’s just—excruciating, this. It’s embarrassing, always has been. God knows why he should be so embarrassed, it’s irrational, but he is.

Lewis just looks at him. “So you’ll put me,” he says eventually. “You’ll put my name.” James is very effectively silenced. He’s not risking embarrassing himself further by formulating a response to _that,_ because he knows he’s misunderstood.

“And I,” says Lewis, raising a hand unnecessarily, as if to stave off any protests, “I’ll be putting you. Better than Lyn getting a middle of the night call from some over-officious body because I’ve fallen over chasing a suspect and knocked me head and them scaring the bloody life out of her. Never liked the thought of doing that to one of my kids. Even if she is a nurse. Not right, really. No,” he says, satisfied, “you’ll put me and I’ll put you. And good luck to you dealing with me daughter if I ever do land up in here for longer than an overnight and you’ve got to take her professional interrogation over the phone.” He grins at James as he concludes.

James stares at him, not deceived. He’s doing this to stave off any enquires that might be coming James’s way. He might want to protect Lyn, yes, but he knows that this way it’ll look more like a partners’ thing. An agreement made between two coppers who understand the job. Kind of officially sanctioned. The stark facts of the junior partner’s humiliating lack of connections in this world screened under the blanket of the senior partner’s protection.

“Don’t you reckon I’d want to know anyway,” Lewis is asking, “if something happened while I wasn’t with you, say? And you couldn’t call me? Or wouldn’t,” he mutters, half to himself.

“She might mind—your daughter.”

“I’ll put her as a secondary one. But I’ll make it clear that you’re the first port of call. You can do that on the forms now. You could on these new forms when I rejoined Oxfordshire anyway, ‘cause I remember thinking: should I put Mark? But it’d be even worse getting a call that far away, wouldn’t it?” _These people and their bloody forms_. “Oh, but you don’t have to have a secondary one,” Lewis adds, hurriedly, probably at the expression on James’s face. “Just the one, James. That’s all they need.”

 _Oh, just you,_ thinks James, calming. _You._

 

A Few Years Later:

“Home before you know it. There’ll be ice-cream.” _And jelly,_ thinks James, _but I’m barely getting away with saying ice-cream._

“If this is an elective surgery, shouldn’t it feel more—voluntary?”

“You want to tell Lyn that you chickened out? ‘Cause I won’t.”

“What’re you at with that phone?”

“It’s your own grandson who wants a picture, remember. _He_ had one taken in _his_ gown when he had _his_ tonsils out so he thought you should—”

“Christ,” huffs Robbie. “And you’re one to talk. I remember you looking like a bloody stork in yours once. All long legs.”

“Smile.”

Yet another nurse materialises. “Just a few final questions…”

“It’s never a few,” comes the low grumble from the bed, meant only for James’s ears. “And it’s all information they’ve already got. Right in front of them. Puts the bureaucracy of the CID into perspective, this place. There’s a reason I retired in the end and I’d swear that had a lot to do with it…”

“Patient’s name?”

“Robert Lewis,” volunteers James cheerfully, keeping a straight face at the patient’s expression.

“Next of kin?”

“James Hathaway,” says James firmly. He slips his hand right through the rail, feeling the strange sensation of cold metal slide against his arm before his hand finds the utterly familiar warmth of Robbie’s, in the well-accustomed clasp, and their hands fit together one more time for reassurance. _In sickness and in health._

“That’d be me,” James adds, rather unnecessarily. And he finds, as he still occasionally does, that the words he’s about to utter can still catch him almost by surprise, in all their familiar phrasing but very much-changed meaning. “Me. I’m Robbie’s partner.”  



End file.
